Lisp was first developed in the late 1950s at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology for research in artificial intelligence. The
great power of the Lisp language makes it superior for other purposes as
well, such as writing editor commands.

GNU Emacs Lisp is largely inspired by Maclisp, which was written at MIT
in the 1960's. It is somewhat inspired by Common Lisp, which became a
standard in the 1980s. However, Emacs Lisp is much simpler than Common
Lisp. (The standard Emacs distribution contains an optional extensions
file, `cl.el', that adds many Common Lisp features to Emacs Lisp.)